From the Publisher:Offers commentary profiling major themes, settings, characters, style, and viewpoints while asking leading questions and summarizing important details.TheLiterature Made Easy Series is more than just plot summaries. Each book describes a classic novel and drama by explaining themes, elaborating on characters, and discussing each author's unique literary style, use of language, and point of view. Extensive illustrations and imaginative, enlightening use of graphics help to make each book in this series livelier, easier, and more fun to use than ordinary literature plot summaries. An unusual feature, "Mind Map" is a diagram that summarizes and interrelates the most important details that students need to understand about a given work. Appropriate for middle and high school students.TheLiterature Made Easy Series is more than just plot summaries. Each book describes a classic novel and drama by explaining themes, elaborating on characters, and discussing each author's unique literary style, use of language, and point of view. Extensive illustrations and imaginative, enlightening use of graphics help to make each book in this series livelier, easier, and more fun to use than ordinary literature plot summaries. An unusual feature, "Mind Map" is a diagram that summarizes and interrelates the most important details that students need to understand about a given work. Appropriate for middle and high school students.

Annotation:In this now-classic tale--a terrifying variation on the traditional boys' adventure story--the brutal behavior of a group of English schoolboys left stranded on a deserted island after an atomic war is an allegory for the defects of society.

Praise

New York Times Book Review"With undertones of '1984' and 'High Wind in Jamaica', this brilliant work is a frightening parody on man's return (in a few weeks) to that state of darkness from which it took him thousands of years to emerge. Fully to succeed, a fantasy must apprach very close to reality. 'Lord of the Flies' does. It must also be superbly written. It is. If criticism must be leveled at such a feat of the imagination, it is permissible perhaps to carp at the very premise on which the whole strange story is founded." - James Stern 10/23/1955

Kenyon Review"Like any orthodox moralist Golding insists that Man is a fallen creature, but he refuses to hypostatize Evil or to locate it in a dimension of its own. On the contrary Beelzebub, Lord of the Flies, is Roger and Jack and you and I, ready to declare himself as soon as we permit him to." - John Peter Autumn 1957

"The Modern Novel""One sees what Golding is doing. He is showing us stripped man, man naked of all the sanctions of custom and civilization, man as he is alone and in his essence, or at any rate, as he can be conceived to be in such a condition." - Walter Allen

New York Review of Books"Though much of the novel is in fact sparely and elegantly written..., there does seem to be a paint-by-numbers quality to its structure and periodically articulated epiphanies. The schoolboys...are types rather than characters....'Lord of the Flies' is a grim anti-pastoral in which adults are disguised as children who replicate the worst of their elders' heritage of ignorance, violence, and warfare." - Joyce Carol Oates 11/06/1997